It is with great regret that readers are notified of the retraction of 3 Experimental and Clinical Transplantation papers from the laboratory of Dr. Maroun M. Abou-Jaoude, of the Department of Surgery, Sacré-Coeur Hospital, Baabda-Hazmieh, Lebanon. The same retraction notice is being applied to 3 papers.^1-3

The journal of Experimental and Clinical Transplantation was notified of several cases of ethical misconduct by Dr. Abou-Jaoude with regard to the use of unrelated living donors in his clinical practice, who constitute a large proportion of the patient population examined in the 3 articles mentioned. This is in direct violation of the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism endorsed by this Journal and the Middle East Society for Organ Transplantation.

As stated in the Instructions for Authors, one of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work has been carried out in accordance with the guidelines laid down in the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism, and they are required to sign an ethical disclosure form to this effect.

It also has been noted that the article “Abou-Jaoude MM, Nawfal N, Najm R, Shaheen J, Almawi WY. Effect of pretransplant hemoglobin blood level on kidney transplant outcome. Exp Clin Transplant. 2009;7(4):214-217” was republished at a later date in essentially the same form under the following title: “Abou-Jaoude MM , Nawfal N, Najm R, Honeidi M, Shaheen J, Almawi WY. Effect of pretransplantation hemoglobin blood concentration on renal allograft survival and function. Transplant Proc. 2010;42(3)760-762.” This constitutes a serious copyright infringement by the authors and the other journal also has been informed of this situation.

The authors of these articles were contacted on 2 occasions for their comments, but no response was received. Upon due consideration, the Editorial Board has decided to formally retract these 3 papers. In retracting these articles, it is the Editors’ hope to deter other scientists from citing them in the future.

Apologies are offered to readers of the Journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

References:

1. Abou-Jaoude MM, Nawfal N, Najm R, Shaheen J, Almawi WY. Effect of pretransplant hemoglobin blood level on kidney transplant outcome. Exp Clin Transplant. 2009;7(4):214-217.
   PubMed
2. Abou-Jaoude MM, Nawfal N, Shaheen J, Daoud Z, Almawi WY. Infectious complications in kidney transplant: A Lebanese perspective. Exp Clin Transplant. 2010;8(2):136-141.
   PubMed
3. Abou-Jaoude MM, Abou-Jaoude WJ, Almawi WY. Sex matching plays a role in outcome of kidney transplant. Exp Clin Transplant. 2012;10(5):466-470.
   CrossRef - PubMed